I’m trying really hard to find an argument amongst your vitriol, and can’t.

If you’re trying to say that tax law should not be made by judges, are you proposing abolition of the current role of the House of Lords?

If not, what?

Why not drop the hyperbole and debate the issue?

Richard

The Partington judgment states only the default rule of construction, which is not absolute but, moreover, reflects that the function of the judiciary is only to construe the laws made by parliament.

The second citation is exactly what the first is not, and is a preamble reflecting the will of a parliament with supreme law making authority.

The point really being made, as I understand it, is why does parliament not enact purposive fiscal legislation ? It has not, and other common law countries, as illustrated, have taken the same line.

The perceived problem, nor its answer, is present not only in fiscal law making. It is just as much present in some other areas, most particularly the criminal law. (For those of us who deal with tax laws, we may feel we have it bad in terms of the endless stream of ill considered, dross this government has produced, but those in the criminal justice system are also not far behind in what they have had to put up with over the past 10 years.)

Purposive laws have the practical effect, or consequence, of passing power, or influence, from parlament to the judiciary. People might argue that a highly educated judge, unelected but correspondingly free of short termist political influences, would be a better source of sound law making than a modern politican.

But, get modern day politicans to agree to step back from playing with their prized toys of raising taxes or locking up people ? The only even remotely likely way this will happen in our lifetimes is for the entirety of the parliament’s law making sovereignty to be swept away by a federalised Europe.